How do you get your Sales team to use Opportunity Contact Roles?

A common question and pain point for B2B marketers is how do you get your Sales team to use Opportunity Contact Roles for the purpose of Salesforce Attribution reporting? Without correct opportunity contact role data, it’s usually not possible to report on marketing’s influence on deals or get a true ROI analysis on which channels, tactics, and campaigns are driving revenue.

The honest answer – You don’t get your sales team to use Opportunity Contact Roles. They never will. And if you force them to it will just result in garbage info. Not to mention that fact that for most B2B marketers with any kind of complex sale, there will be multiple influencers and decision makers at the account over time. Salesforce Campaign Influence is limited to only doing 100% Last Touch Attribution models (and then there are double counting issues).

Better to look at all the actions at the account level. B2B marketers sell to accounts, not contacts. This is very clear with the rise of account based marketing (ABM).

Even if reps did fill out Opportunity Contact Roles perfectly correctly, there are still a few main issues with Salesforce Campaign Influence reporting, including a reliance on highly flawed 100% Last Touch Attribution models, double counting campaign influence, no marketing automation data, or fractional/Multi-touch attribution reporting or weighting.

Closes the “Opportunity Contact Role Gap” by looking at the activities of all the contacts at the account level – whether the sales rep took the time to select them in Salesforce, or (far more likely) not.

Sales is just not going to fill out this information correctly, but the data is in your system. You can try to force process down the throats of an unwilling sales team, or buy purpose built software to do the job. Tools like AttributeApp can close the data gap and provide multi-touch attribution reporting combining your marketing automation and Salesforce data for true ROI insights and analysis.